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If you search “Bling Ring” on Netflix, one of the top results is 2022’s “The Real Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist,” a familiar-looking docuseries that fits in alongside dozens of other Netflix true-crime documentaries. That makes sense for the story of a group of Southern California teenagers who committed shockingly brazen robberies of various celebrity homes in 2008 and 2009, and if you watch the series, you’ll learn about the facts of the case and the personalities involved.
But I’d suggest looking past that obvious result to Sofia Coppola’s brilliant 2013 film “The Bling Ring,” which is also available on Netflix as of this month, and applies sophisticated artistry to the kind of trashy real-life story that usually doesn’t get such elegant consideration.
Coppola’s film, which is based on a 2010 Vanity Fair article about the robberies, includes many of the same details as the docu-series (or other depictions of the case), but it’s also a slyly satirical take on the nature of celebrity in the age of reality TV and social media. Coppola takes the woozy vibes and sensitive portrayal of troubled teenage girls from her 1999 debut film “The Virgin Suicides” and applies them to the entitled, deluded members of the so-called Bling Ring. The result may be my favorite Coppola film, and certainly her most underrated.
‘The Bling Ring’ has impeccable vibes
Coppola sets the tone from the opening line, as teenage ringleader Rebecca Ahn (Katie Chang) gleefully exclaims, “Let’s go shopping!” after she and her friends have broken into their latest celebrity house. The montage that follows is virtually indistinguishable from a typical movie montage featuring characters on an upscale shopping spree, except this spree takes place inside a very rich person’s closet. Coppola immediately conflates ever-present American consumerism with the characters’ casual criminal behavior.
Chang plays Rebecca as a sort of cheerful sociopath who has no qualms about committing major burglaries and manipulates her best friend, Marc Hall (Israel Broussard), into helping her. The affable but insecure Marc is the closest that “The Bling Ring” has to a sympathetic character, with his desperate need to fit in and his honest but ineffectual objections to the group’s increasingly bold and dangerous activities. He’s still just as superficial and status-obsessed as his friends, though, reveling in the designer fashions that they pick up from the homes of celebrities like Paris Hilton and Orlando Bloom or buy with stolen cash.
Coppola beautifully depicts the allure of that gaudy, hedonistic lifestyle, drenching the soundtrack in pop hits from the period and shooting the friends’ nights out in trendy clubs like music videos about existential dread.
Emma Watson and Taissa Farmiga play best friends and pseudo-sisters Nicki and Sam Moore, whose all-consuming desire for fame drives everything that they do, and Coppola frames them with all the tacky glamour of the reality stars they wish they could be.
‘The Bling Ring’ features pitch-perfect performances
Forget the “Harry Potter” movies or “Little Women” — the best performance of Emma Watson’s career is her majestically vapid take on Nicki Moore, who completely buys into her own grandiose self-image. Her proclamations to the press about her supposed future as a leader and healer are hilariously clueless. Watson manages to deliver a simple line like “Your butt looks awesome” with such a stunning mix of contempt and envy that it encapsulates everything horrifying and fascinating about her character.
Leslie Mann offers a perfect counterpoint as Nicki’s equally narcissistic mother, a former model and supposed self-help guru who “homeschools” her daughters with lessons from pop-psychology bestseller “The Secret.” She’s like the real-world version of Amy Poehler’s “cool mom” from “Mean Girls,” creating the environment for her daughters to assume that the world owes them everything and that they should never take any responsibility.
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Chang, Broussard and Claire Julien (as the group member with criminal contacts) were all newcomers at the time, and their relative unfamiliarity continues to be an asset, giving the characters an anonymous quality that helps sell them as middle-class strivers.
Even the comparative paltriness of the celebrities that the group targets bolsters the movie’s sense of the emptiness of their pursuits. Stars like Hilton and Bloom are still pretty famous, but not many people remember “The Hills” star Audrina Patridge or Bloom’s ex-wife Miranda Kerr anymore, which makes the group’s obsession with them all the more pathetic.
‘The Bling Ring’ continues to resonate
Enough time has passed that “The Bling Ring” now functions as a mesmerizing time capsule of the fashions, music and pop culture of the late ’00s, as well as the nascent fixation on social media, which here is primarily about Facebook. Coppola mixes all of these elements together seamlessly, incorporating actual footage from sources like TMZ and even shooting in Hilton’s real house, which adds to the movie’s flair for the uncanny.
The glossy images may seem too slick at times, but Coppola knows exactly how to deploy them. In a jaw-dropping sequence, she films the group’s robbery of Patridge’s home in a single unbroken shot from afar, framing the house, with its massive uncovered floor-to-ceiling windows, like a diorama, with the tiny figures of Rebecca and Marc scurrying about. It’s both gorgeous and clinical, in a movie full of similarly striking observations.
“The Bling Ring” is now streaming on Netflix
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